Public school education in America has experienced almost no substantive change in the design, methods, and approaches implemented to teach, assess, and improve learning over the last 100 years. Similarly, professional educational programs at our universities and colleges are at a crossroads, searching for methods to ensure that members of their respective professions acquire and maintain competency skills and ethical behaviors to preserve the professions' social contract with society at large, and in turn, preserve the professions' autonomy, esteem, and privilege of self-regulation. As we move towards an ever more connected global economy, we must dramatically redesign our educational methods and systems to focus on how to teach people to think and on how to teach people to perform. From Robert B. Reich in The Work of Nations, to The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's senior scholar William Sullivan in Work and Integrity: The Crisis and Promise of Professionalism in America, to the Institute of Medicine in Crossing the Quality Chasm and others, the message is clear, we must reform our education system. Education is the life-blood of our economic health, a source of our respect and power as a world leader, and a key ingredient to individual quality of life under a free market economy. Yet, education is starved of innovation.
Evolutionary changes in education have occurred, to be sure, with the expansion of technology and the internet. Other inventors have created an online portfolio to evaluate task performance under U.S. Pat. Application Pub. No. 2004/0224496 to Carraccio and performance improvement pathways under U.S. Pat. Application Pub. No. 2008/0059292 to Myers, Karp, & Rabin through exploiting the use of technology to convert pre-existing manual methods into internet-based methods. Other inventors have used technology to create methods to push “mini-lessons” to employees throughout their workday under U.S. Pat. No. 6,767,211 to Hall and Shields (2004) as well as pull goals from people about sales targets, making financial investments, and weight loss under U.S. Pat. No. 5,954,510 to Merrill (1999). Still others have used technology to create systems to track employee certifications, match their skills to jobs and tasks to which they are qualified, and identify and deliver employee training under U.S. Pat. No. 6,157,808 to Hollingsworth (2000); to create systems to deliver online interactive multimedia through audiovisual presentations under U.S. Pat. No. 6,514,079 to McMenimen and Sack (2003); and to create systems to deliver online distance learning by disseminating school curriculum over the internet with an Intelligent Administrator under U.S. Pat. No. 5,904,485 to Siefert (1994). Such evolutionary change has resulted through the advent of technology, the internet, and the creative insight of inventors.
What our education system needs, however, is revolutionary change. A dramatic departure, a fundamental shift in our methodology to teach competency skills and ethical behaviors must emerge to effectively prepare our citizens for fruitful work in the 21st Century. What served us well as a mode of education and led to great prosperity over the first eighty or so years of the last hundred will not preserve our competitiveness in the future. We should bury outmoded approaches to pre-post assessments (U.S. Pat. Application Pub. No. 2004/0224496, Carrraccio) and prescribed pathways like skills checklist and course syllabi (U.S. Pat. Application Pub. No. 2008/0059292, Myers, Karp, & Rabin) as the method to formal education. For a hundred years we have taught, tested, and assigned scores with this approach. We should abandon arcane approaches that lack sufficient evidence to support their continuance, such as self-set goals which lack a framework of goal elements which support successful goal-setting and focus instead on criteria such as goal “importance” and “relevance” which positively impact goal attainment. (U.S. Pat. No. 5,954,510, Merrill). We should exercise care in consuming new approaches which may have an adverse impact on the learning or work environment such as “mini-lessons” pushed throughout the work day which may adversely impact attention to task and productivity (U.S. Pat. No. 6,767,211, Hall and Shields), or the negative feedback of falling of the “pathway.” Such recent innovations lie in disseminating the same old approaches through the use of technology. Herein lies their novelty. Such methods should be abandoned because they simply do not support learners in acquiring the competency skills and ethical behaviors to think and perform an occupational task.
Moreover, we must make a paradigmatic shift from contrivances which merely deliver educational content or curriculum more effectively and efficiently (U.S. Pat. No. 6,767,211, Hall and Shields, U.S. Pat. No. 6,157,808, Hollingsworth, U.S. Pat. No. 5,904,485 Siefert, and U.S. Pat. No. 6,514,079, McMenimen and Sack). Technology and the internet create unfettered access to the broadest scope of content the world has ever known. What we must instead create is a method which teaches a learner how to think and how to perform in ways that drive him or her to search and locate relevant content so that he or she may achieve competent performance of enumerated skills and behaviors established by self-regulatory bodies who set competency standards. Relevant content is dynamic and rapidly changing. As such, the shifting role of educators must be redefined to teach learners how to find, analyze, judge, combine, and make good use of readily available content. We are charged with creating smarter contexts for learning so that our citizens develop deep, multi-sided intelligence to enable performance over time in our rapidly changing world. To this end, we must employ an educational system and method that enables teachers and mentors to inject tools, media, activities, and curriculum into rich, authentic learning environments which deliver individualized, competency-aligned media to drive the development of intelligent occupational performance. To be sure, a teacher, mentor or learner may someday be able to download an “App” (i.e. education application) from the internet which has relevant content specific to the learner's acquisition of a particular competency skill, but the fundamental shift requires that learning occur in the real world, in the authentic environment where the task is actually performed, not sitting hooked up to a computer to passively, or even interactively, learning prescribed curriculum (U.S. Pat. No. 6,157,808, Hollingsworth, U.S. Pat. No. 6,514,079 to McMenimen and Sack, U.S. Pat. No. 5,904,485, Siefert).
Public school teachers, administrators, and other stakeholders subject to the No Child Left Behind and the Higher Education mandates as well as professional regulatory bodies have expressed a strong need for development of a methodology to measure learning and performance improvement by means other than standardized testing as it relates to their Annual-Yearly-Progress (AYP) Reports, their funding, their reputation, and some cases, their very existence. They argue that standardized testing simply fails to capture real progress and real change that is occurring at the classroom level. To date, no such method or system has been identified to meet the needs of the public schools, the government oversight agencies, and the public to ensure that we fulfill our promise to raise the floor of public education.
The U.S. Department of Education and the National Center for Education Statistics have expressed a long-felt, unsolved need to develop methods to facilitate our ability to examine and improve alignment, attainment, and persistence issues in education. To date, no such comprehensive method or system has been identified to meet this need. The challenge is great. Development of a learning method and system which produces real-time informatics and analytics to enable examination and improvement of alignment, attainment, and persistence issues that is financially feasible, deployable, and sustainable confounds us. If we add to that the need to design a methodology and system that cross-cuts K-12 public school education through professional post-graduate education programs and into the work force, creating a workable solution is great indeed.
Beyond all this lies the hurdle of developing a comprehensive education method and system which supports rigorous scientific inquiry to encourage the emergence of evidence-based education. A well-founded framework paired with the learners' informatics and analytic data would support thoughtful inquiry by experts in their respective specialties to spur evidence-based education. The need is great, the potential results profound. Our education system is wanting of such an approach.
Nothing short of transformation will fix our out-dated approach to education.